Peregrinamur

Since my friend Dick is a keen cyclist and I’d done one cycling holiday in Finland, I thought it would be fun to do a cycle trip together. I was keen to do part of the Baltic Sea Cycle Path, and the section from Lübeck to Stralsund looked varied and interesting. We chose an organised tour with rented bikes and luggage moved between hotels, operated by Radweg-Reisen.

To make the trip more relaxed, we decided to fly to Hamburg and to have two nights there before taking the train up to Lübeck. From Hamburg Airport, it’s an easy trip into the city on the S-Bahn; we’d bought one day city travel passes online in advance. Hotel Hanseport is in St Pauli (described by hamburg.com as ‘unique, loud, flashy, flamboyant, hip and, above all, colourful’…)

Whatever, the S-Bahn took us to Reeperbahn from where it was just a five minute walk to the hotel.

There are lots of boat tours for sale, but we realised that our day passes covered the harbour ferries too, so we spent much of the afternoon riding around the harbour at no extra cost. At one point our ferry stopped because a couple of people were attempting to swim across the Elbe; probably not the best idea when there are cruise ships using the river. Police boats arrived to get them out of harm’s way. That said, not far downstream from the busy harbour, people were cooling off at the city beaches:

We stopped off nearby for dinner. The Radweg-Reisen travel documents provide a recipe for Labskaus, with the encouraging line ‘it tastes better than it looks’.

We spent our second day in Hamburg wandering around Mitte, Speicherstadt (the warehouse area) and Hafencity.

The architecture of the St Michaelis Church is quite extraordinary:

On the other hand, the Katharinenkirche provided bean bags and a rotating globe:

We also managed to find a small but perfect car museum; Prototyp, including an amazing collection of early Porsches and specials.

On the 4th July, we made our way to Hamburg’s Hauptbahnhof and took the train to Lübeck. We left our luggage in lockers and went off to explore the city. I was a little disappointed that the Buddenbrookhaus was closed, because I’d started reading ‘Buddenbrooks’ before the trip.

The astronomical clock in the Marienkirche was a highlight:

Dinner at ‘The Newport‘ in the harbour area was excellent.

Then we returned to the station, picked up our luggage and took a taxi to Waldhotel Twiehaus. Things went a bit wrong here: Annette was looking at our progress on the ‘Find My’ app and was surprised to see me apparently leave the hotel and move randomly around Lübeck. I’d dropped my phone in the taxi. Luckily, the taxi driver answered it and very kindly brought it back out to me. I think he was pleased with the tip I gave him…

Anyway it was a very friendly hotel and the lady in charge helped us with the bikes and gave us lots of tips.

The first day of cycling had a pretty relaxed start. We rode back to Lübeck harbour where, at 10.30, we got on a boat for a one and a half hour trip up to Travemünde. Once there, we had to take a short ferry ride across the Trave; because of the late start to the day, we felt a little bit of time pressure to cycle the 55 km to Hotel Am Alten Hafen in Wismar so we didn’t stop to take in many views on the way, but we arrived in Wismar in plenty of time, the city looking splendid in the evening light.

The following day, Sunday 6th July, the route suggestion was again to start with a boat trip; this time out to the island of Poel. The boat was scheduled to leave at 11 am and the trip to the island would take an hour. We were feeling a bit impatient, so we decided to get on the bikes and cycle up to the causeway across to Poel near Groß Strömkendorf. We were in Kirchdorf on the island before the boat had left Wismar. From there, we returned to the mainland via the causeway and cycled on up the coast, pausing for a swim near Kühlungsdorf.

Our overnight stay was in the Hotel Doberaner Hof. We’d booked to eat in Café Zikke and were a bit surprised to find that it was next door to the hotel. The food was excellent; I had butterfish.

The route plan for Monday 7th July suggested cycling back the way we came as far as Heiligendamm, about 5 km. However, Heiligendamm was served by a narrow gauge steam train, ‘Molli’, that stopped right outside our hotel, so we decided to take that. Throughout the trip we’d been a bit surprised at how little English was spoken, but the guard on the train seemed to take it as a personal affront that we weren’t fluent in German and was very grumpy and unhelpful, and clearly decided that my rendering of ‘Heiligendamm’ was completely unintelligible. Nonetheless, we managed to get the bikes on and off the train successfully.

We arrived at a very lively Warnemünde in time for lunch, after which we had a short ferry crossing to Hohe Düne before carrying on to Graal-Müritz and the Strandhotel.

We’d booked dinner there before the trip, asking for a table at 7.30pm, but they asked if we could come earlier, at 6.30pm. We had a very nice meal but by 8pm the restaurant was pretty much deserted. In fact, whilst all the resorts were busy in the daytime, they were very quiet in the evenings. Eating early was the norm. Of course, that suited us quite well, because we were pretty tired from the cycling.

Tuesday’s section from Graal-Müritz to Barth was a highlight as we cycled on the Fischland peninsula between the sea and the lagoons (or Bodden). Throughout the trip the surfaces we cycled on were pretty good, from smooth tarmac to gravel paths and slightly bumpy concrete blocks. Not that many sections of the path actually have a view of the sea; often there’s a dune between you and it, so you need to get off and walk a few metres to see the sea. Navigation was generally straightforward; in any case Radweg-Reisen provide links to the route data on Komoot.com which Dick had downloaded onto his Garmin. I’m glad we had something additional to the route maps in Radweg-Reisen’s booklet and the signposts along the way. These are probably sufficient – and we didn’t have any problems at all.

Wednesday 9th July was our last day cycling, a very pretty section from Barth to Stralsund, skirting the southern edges of the Barther Bodden and Grabow lakes. We only had about 45 km to do, so we arrived in Stralsund quite early, with plenty of time to explore the city and have a reward after cycling 290km in five days.

We said farewell to the bikes and on the 10th July, took a direct train from Stralsund to Hamburg. This was an Intercity-Express requiring seat reservations rather than the local train we’d taken from Hamburg to Lübeck. Dick had checked the day before and there seemed to be plenty of seats available, but he checked again in the evening and there seemed to be only four seats left, so he quickly bought two of them. In fact, there didn’t seem to be any issues with space on the train, although the ‘express’ part didn’t seem to materialise either: It felt like a very slow trip.

Back in Hamburg we visited the extraordinary Miniatur Wunderland: ‘die größte Modelleisenbahn der Welt’. Built with the philosophy ‘too much is not enough’, the displays are somewhat overwhelming. I enjoyed the Monaco Grand Prix section, and seeing the Copacabana Palace in the Rio de Janeiro section brought back happy memories of staying there!

And on the 11th, back to Heathrow…